The stylus, Ive said, will feel like “a more natural extension” of the pen and paper experience but achieving that degree of natural behavior “was a significant technological challenge,” he revealed.

Compared the Apple Pencil to every other stylus you’ve used, he said that other styluses offer “a pretty poor representation of the analogue world”.

Many of us in the design team have worked together for 20 plus years. We’ve always drawn in our sketchbooks, and for the first time – despite flirting with some alternatives a couple of years ago – I’m seeing people starting to use the iPad and Apple Pencil.

Our personal experience has been that there are definitely affordances and opportunities now that you have a much more natural and intuitive environment to make marks, there are clearly things you can do sketching and writing on the iPad which you could never dream of doing in the analogue world.

Of charging the Pencil through the iPad Pro via Lightning I/O, Ive said that “if somebody points that out it’s hardly a moment of considerable epiphany for us.”

“We don’t like to have to charge multiple devices and manage them either so one of the things we’ve worked extremely hard on is the actual process of charging,” he argued.

Still, he thinks the Pencil is inevitable when it comes to creative apps.

“What I’ve enjoyed is when I’m just thinking, holding the Pencil as I would my pen with a sketchpad and I just start drawing,” he enthuses.

“When you start to realise you’re doing that without great intent and you’re just using it for the tool that it is, you realise that you’ve crossed over from demoing it and you’re actually starting to use it. As you cross that line, that’s when it actually feels the most powerful.”